Look Both Ways, page 28
“You must know it, being her personal assistant and all?”
“No, she never trusted me with it. So all this talk . . . about shutting everything down, it’s pointless.”
Joe nodded. “I’m not worried about the password. It’s shutting down the Arrivals I need help with.”
Ruskin’s brow wrinkled. “How can you not be worried about the password? Did you read her mind this morning?”
“No,” Joe said. “I had another way.” He paused. “I’m sorry about this, Mr. Ruskin. But if you can’t advise me on the shutdown, I think we’re done.”
Now Ruskin looked even more puzzled. “How—”
He was unable to finish the question. Joe yanked, suddenly, on the arm Ruskin had been using to prop himself up. The man hit the floor. Quickly, Joe put his hands on the man’s head, grasping it like a melon, raised it six inches off the floor and then slammed it down on the floor.
Hard.
The sound as his skull shattered ricocheted through Joe’s gut. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take. But he was in up to his eyeballs now and he had to make sure the deed was done.
So, he placed his palm over Ruskin’s mouth, and used his thumb to pinch the man’s nose shut. He pressed and squeezed as hard as he could, and the fact that he wasn’t encountering any resistance was a good sign.
Ruskin must already be dead.
After a minute, during which he looked over his shoulder every couple of seconds in case Sandra returned, he took his hand away, stood and got himself back in the chair in front of the laptop.
Thirty-Seven
Katie had a dream.
She is with her dad, at the beach they used to go to on Cape Cod, before the family moved to Garrett Island. Her father, in a pair of bright red trunks, is running down to the incoming surf, waving at her to join him.
She was just a little kid when they went to Cape Cod, but in the dream, she is her current age. A big girl, although in the dream she has a brilliant pink plastic pail and an equally luminous green shovel, making the most rudimentary of sand castles, the kind she made when she was four or five.
“Come on!” her dad shouts, still waving, the seawater breaking around his ankles. “The water’s fine!”
Katie hears a voice. It’s her mother’s, although she doesn’t see her in the dream. She says, sternly, “Do as your father says.”
Now the water is up to her father’s knees as he continues to stride in, like a soldier intent on marching his way to Europe. So Katie gets up and runs, barefoot, toward the ocean, her feet shifting with each step on the hot sand.
“Coming, Daddy!” she cries. “I’m coming!”
But when she reaches the damp sand, where the waves have come in and retreated rhythmically, she does not see her father.
“Daddy!” she cries.
She looks left and then right. There is no one else in the water. As she glances back, she sees no one on the beach. No one is spread out on a towel. There are no umbrellas, no folding chairs. Not even her mother is there.
Now Katie is very frightened. She scans the ocean, hoping her father will bob up someplace, playfully, and laugh at how he has tricked her. But when she does not see him, she wades in farther until the water—and oh, it is so, so cold—is up to her waist.
That is when she feels something brush up against her leg. At first, she thinks it’s a fish, or maybe seaweed, but when she looks down into the water she sees her father, stretched out, looking up.
Not moving.
Katie screams, “Daddy! Daddy!”
But then she notices his lips are moving. He’s trying to tell her something. Bubbles rise from his mouth as he speaks. Like in a cartoon, when the bubbles break the surface, his words emerge.
“Hi, honey bunch,” says the first bubble.
“Daddy!”
“It looks to me like . . .” says the second bubble.
Katie is trying to grab hold of her father, to pull him up, but every time she tries to reach for him, he slips from her grasp.
The third bubble pops to the surface.
Her father says, “. . . Bruce is dead.”
Katie says, “What? What did you say?”
But then, suddenly, her father is gone, as if he were made of salt and had instantly dissolved.
“Daddy, Daddy!”
“Daddy!”
That last scream was real, and loud enough that Katie woke herself up. The first thing she noticed as she opened her eyes was that she was pressed up against the passenger door of the Cadillac. The car was seriously listing to the right. As she turned her head to look out the window, she found herself looking down into the ditch.
She was also quickly aware that she was in pain. Her left temple was throbbing, and when she touched it, it was wet. She was bleeding.
Slowly, she turned her head toward the driver’s side of the vehicle.
“Bruce! Oh God, Bruce!”
He should have slid across the seat and been resting against her, given the rules of gravity, but somehow Bruce’s left arm had gotten hung up on the steering wheel, so his body had only shifted slightly toward the center of the car. His head hung limply on his neck, his chin on his chest. The right side of his face looked fine, but there was still a lot of blood, which was easily attributable to the shattered driver’s side window. Katie couldn’t see the other side of Bruce’s face from where she sat, but she was guessing it had endured a thousand cuts, given all the glass scattered across the seat, his lap, and the floor.
The entire length of the massive driver’s door was smashed in, but the Arrival that had rammed them was not there. Katie looked out the rear window, saw the Arrival sitting in the middle of the road, about a hundred yards back, its front end completely caved in, airbags inside deployed even though there were no passengers. What must have happened was, the Arrival came out of the side street, T-boned them, bounced back, and the Caddy kept going until it ran off into the ditch. Katie didn’t remember that part. She remembered seeing the car coming at them, thought that maybe she remembered the crash, but after that, nothing. She touched her temple again, wondering how she’d hit that part of her head, then figured that at the moment of impact, she was thrown toward the driver’s side, and whomped her head on the edge of the steering wheel.
She tentatively touched Bruce’s shoulder, gave him a mild nudge.
“Bruce? Bruce? Can you hear me? Bruce?”
Bruce said nothing.
Tears welled up in Katie’s eyes. “Come on! Bruce! Wake up!”
Bruce did not wake up.
Katie crawled, upward, across the seat, and hung onto the steering wheel so she wouldn’t slide back. She put her ear to Bruce’s chest, held her own breath so she could listen better for a heartbeat.
Thump thump. Thump thump.
“Yes!” Katie said, taking her head away. “Okay, Bruce, you’re still with me. Right? You’re alive. I don’t know if you can hear me or not, but I’m going to get help. I am. I’m going to call an ambulance.”
She dug into her pocket for her phone, punched in 911, and put the phone to her ear.
And listened to it ring, And ring. And ring.
Finally, the ringing stopped.
“Hello?” Katie said. “Hello?”
But she hadn’t been connected. The call had died. She muttered an obscenity, put the phone back into her pocket, and said to Bruce, “So, I don’t think we can get an ambulance out here right now. We need another plan.”
She pondered whether she could slide Bruce out from behind the wheel, get into the driver’s seat, and then drive the car to GGH, Garrett General Hospital. There were two problems with that. The first was, she didn’t know whether Bruce could be moved safely, and second, she didn’t know whether the car was driveable.
“Can you move, Bruce?” she asked.
When he failed to respond, she tucked one arm in between his back and the seat, and looped her other arm around his right leg. If she could tug him out from under the wheel—
“Aw!” Bruce shouted.
“Sorry! Sorry!” Katie said, slipping her arm out from behind his back and letting go of his leg.
Bruce didn’t show any more signs of being conscious now than he had twenty seconds earlier, but he’d sure felt the pain.
“Okay, I won’t try to move you,” Katie said. “I’ll get help.”
She looked out through the windshield, turned around, and checked where they’d come from. Getting her bearings.
“Bruce, Bruce, listen to me,” she said, bracing her feet against the passenger door to keep her close to him. “I’m going to go. If more of those cars come, I think they’ll leave you alone because you look like, well, you kind of look dead and the other Arrival is totally wrecked.” She sniffed, worked to hold back tears. “I’m heading for home. Maybe my mom is there and she’ll know what to do. And if I see a police car or an ambulance on the way I’ll flag them down.”
Bruce said nothing.
Katie, now unable to hold back the tears, leaned in closer and kissed him on the cheek, his stubble like sandpaper to her lips.
“Please don’t die, Bruce. Please, please don’t die.”
She allowed herself to slide back over to the passenger side. When she opened her door, she hung on to it, not wanting it to snap off the hinges. No sense doing any more damage to Bruce’s car than had already been done. Think positively, she told herself. Bruce is going to be okay. He’s going to recover.
And so will his beloved Cadillac.
She dropped into the ditch and, putting her shoulders into it, pushed the door shut. She scrabbled back up onto the highway. But before she started to trek into town, there was one thing she had to do first.
She walked over to the smashed Arrival and, with chin quivering, looked at it and said two words:
“Fuck you.”
Katie started heading for home.
Thirty-Eight
Sandra entered the administrator’s office carrying a small blue nylon bag with a Red Cross symbol on the side. “Found this,” she said to Joe, who was behind the desk, looking at the laptop. “There’s all kinds of stuff in here. Bandages, cold compresses, gauze, those antiseptic wipes. I know you’re not a paramedic, but you’ve probably had more experience with this kind of thing than I have, so—”
But then she looked at Ruskin and said, “Oh, shit, he doesn’t look good.”
Joe, grim-faced, got out of the chair and came around the desk. Sandra was still looking at Ruskin as he put his hands on her shoulders.
“Shit,” she said, starting to make a move to get down on one knee to have a closer look at him. But Joe held her back.
“There’s nothing you can do,” he said mournfully, keeping her in front of him.
“Jesus, what happened?” she said. “It was a bump on the head. He was alive when I left here. Wasn’t he?”
Joe nodded. “He was. But soon after you left, he was making some noises, and I checked on him. A few seconds later and he was gone. But he did say something.”
“What?”
“He said he was sorry.”
Sandra’s eyes went wide. “I knew it. I knew it.”
“He said he helped Kyle. Put a stick into Lisa Carver’s computer when she got sick, passed it to Kyle. And that allowed Kyle to introduce the virus into the system.”
Sandra was stunned. “He told you all that?”
“Yeah.” Joe’s voice softened. “He never had any idea that it would be this bad, that the cars would become deadly, hunt people down.” Joe shook his head sadly. “He just, he never wanted anything like that to happen.”
Sandra blinked. “How’d he manage to tell you all that in the time I was gone?”
Joe nodded. “You know what I think? I think he knew he was dying and there were things he needed to get off his chest. Fast.”
Sandra looked again at the body of Ruskin on the floor. “He hated her. He hated Lisa Carver. He told me, before you got here. God, what a horrible man.”
Joe grimaced. “I don’t know. Maybe . . . maybe sometimes people have good intentions that can go horribly wrong.”
She gave him a sharp look. “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly.
Sandra shifted past him and looked at the open laptop. “So where does that leave us? I mean, okay, he said he was sorry, but did he tell you how to make it stop?”
As she looked at the screen, her eyes widened. There was something on it. An Arrival logo across the top. Notes, numbers, fields in which to enter data.
Sandra’s jaw dropped. “Are you in?”
Joe smiled, nodded.
“You got into her laptop?”
“Before Ruskin died, he gave me the password.”
“You’re kidding.”
Joe’s cheek twitched. “No. Like I said, I think he knew it was his last chance to do the right thing.”
Sandra looked skeptical for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay, okay, tell me what you’ve found.”
Joe got into the chair and moved the cursor around the screen. “This is where I tell you I’ve got good news and bad news. I’ve already given you the good news, which is that I got the password.”
“What was it, anyway?”
“Huh?”
“The password. What was the password?”
“Her daughter’s name.”
Sandra took a moment, then said, “Say again?”
“It’s Zenia, but spelled backward. A, I—”
“I get it,” Sandra said. Then quietly, “Ruskin told you this.”
Joe nodded. “She’d change it daily. The name part stays the same but it had to be followed by the previous day’s numeric date.” He shrugged. “So, that worked, and I’m in, but the bad news is, I can’t figure out how to get into the brains of the Arrival system.”
“Okay,” Sandra said, her voice very quiet. “You think there’s a chance?”
Joe shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll keep trying. Thing is, there’s so much else going on—” at which point he grabbed his cell phone off the desk and waved it in the air “—that I’m needed in a hundred other places right now.” His face went grim. “Something huge went down at the ferry terminal. Help was coming but the Arrivals launched an attack.”
Sandra sighed, bit her lip. “Katie and Archie are out there somewhere. I’ve got to find them. You do what you can here. I’m going. That bike in the hall. Is it yours?”
“For now. You’re not going out there.”
“I am. I’m going home.”
“I told you, the kids weren’t—”
“When they show up—and they will show up—I’m going to be there.”
He nodded his understanding.
“I’ve still got Lisa Carver’s phone. Anything happens, call me,” she said, moving for the door.
“Got it.” He waited a second, then said, “Hey.”
She stopped.
“I love you,” he said.
Sandra did her best to crack a smile and slipped out of the room.
Thirty-Nine
Why couldn’t she say it? Why couldn’t she tell him she loved him, too? Would it have killed her to say those three words?
Joe thought about how that woman had no idea of the lengths he’d gone to, the risks he’d taken, to make a life for them. Not just for the two of them, but for her children, as well.
No fucking idea at all.
And he’d done those things because he loved her. He loved her so much.
But oh no, saying it back to him, that was too hard.
Okay, okay, maybe his timing was off. She was thinking about her kids. Understandable. She had other things on her mind.
But when this was over, when the dust settled, he was sure she’d see him in a positive light. This crisis, as bad as it was, was an opportunity. It was a chance for her to see him in a leadership role. A heroic role. He really was Chief Brody, but instead of saving Amity from a big fish, he was saving Garrett Island from a thousand murderous cars.
Admittedly, there was one major difference. Chief Brody had not invited that shark into the waters off Amity’s beaches. Chief Brody did not create the crisis.
Joe Bridgeman was well aware of the role he’d played in what had happened today. He wasn’t blind to what he’d done. But Your Honor, he pleaded in the imaginary courtroom in his mind, I’m guilty with an explanation. When he speculated to Sandra about how he thought Ruskin never meant for things to get this out of hand—all bullshit, of course, given that Ruskin was not even remotely responsible for the sabotaging of the Arrival network—Joe was, in effect, formulating his own defense, in the event what he’d done became known. He could never have imagined the venality of the virus, its tremendous potential for harm.
He’d never have made a deal with Brandon Kyle had he known that anyone would get hurt.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” Joe had asked Kyle during one of their meetings.
Kyle had laughed. “Some of the press may get squirted with windshield washer fluid. Maybe the doors won’t open. Maybe one of the cars will drive off by itself right into a telephone pole.”
“But no one’ll get hurt, right?”
“I can’t promise a tire won’t run over someone’s foot, but that would be about the worst of it. The last thing I want is for anyone to get hurt. Now, tell me again how much you said you need to put your mother in a home?”
“I wouldn’t call it a home,” he’d said. “Funny about that word. It’s so nice, except when you use it to describe a place to put parents. I like to call it a seniors’ living center. It’s a very nice place. Lots of activities. There’s the monthly apartment fee itself, then they provide meals, and she’s not as steady as she used to be so when she has to go to the bathroom—”
“Would three hundred thousand cover everything for a few years?”
Boy, would it ever.
He knew he should have told Kyle to get lost. In fact, he probably should have called the FBI and set up a sting. Corporate sabotage was a crime. But Joe had to give Kyle credit. The man had come prepared. A shrewd operator, that’s what he was.
